There's always some asshole asking "Qui Bono?" – the latin phrase for "Who benefits?" – after innocent people are shot dead by an armed maniac. Because the typical reaction to such events is for a renewed round of calls for increases in gun control, the paranoid freaks out there immediately assume that the shooting was a false flag intended to provide an impetus for taking guns away from lawful owners. Alex Jones will rant and scream, call the victims "crisis actors", come up with some bullshit sci-fi story about how the shooter was under the influence of Soros mind control chemicals, Marjorie Taylor Greene will harass the survivors, Rush Limbaugh's incorporeal soul trapped in the fiery, brimstone-y part of the hereafter will say the shooter was a Democrat, so on and so forth. It's a well worn trope these days, so much so that we at National Zero just assume readers are already well acquainted with it when we write our headlines.

I spell it out here however, because it occurred to me that this is almost EXACTLY analogous to the situation that's playing out right now with Republican efforts to legislate voter suppression in Georgia, Arizona, Florida, Texas, and other states these days. Like whenever a shooting massacre makes national news, the response to the attack is an effort to help make sure it never happens again, even though the China-Dominion-Venezuela story is complete bullshit. Sixty-odd court cases rejected. Zero evidence of interference or malfeasance. And yet, it looks like that's the one that results in a significant assault on Constitutionally-protected liberties by the government.

When you hear elected Republicans say some shit like "Well we need to make changes because my constituents still have concerns about the last election" you should believe them. They are being 100% sincere and honest when they say Republican voters may just sit out elections if they don't think their votes are going to count. It happened in the Georgia Senate runoffs.

What they aren't being honest about is the provenance of such "concerns". If said Republicans weren't pushing this MyPillow Kraken bullshit, or even pushing against it back then, it doesn't matter. They're still going with the flow now. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp resisted Trump's browbeating and threats in the aftermath of the 2020 election, told him the election in his state was conducted properly (it was), and yet here Kemp is signing the bill outlawing volunteers handing out water to people waiting five hours to vote all the same (among other, more bureaucratic and much more insidious measures), the sick fuck. Kemp is a dead man politically because Trump will sic Doug Collins or Marjorie Taylor Greene to primary him out of office, but he's still a party man and GOP uber alles. Or he's a racist troll. Or both. It doesn't matter why Kemp signed it, because he's already signed it. Expect Arizona Governor Doug Ducey to do the same with a similar bill there. They will rationalize it and pretend it's "improving election integrity" because that is the party line.

This is the false flag attack. We're through the looking glass. Trust the plan. Do your own research. Additional generic Q-conspiracy bullshit trope. We saw this coming. We know who benefits. Now the question is how do we make sure they pay the wages of sin.